Now that you speak of reproduction rates, here's a thing that's bugging me:
For example, in the past 20 years, the Amish population in the US has doubled, increasing from 123,000 in 1991 to 249,000 in 2010.
What does that mean? Doubling sounds like a lot, but consider this:
It's about a 3.5% yearly growth. Your bank balance can probably do that with a reasonably diversified portfolio, at least if you can afford parking your money for a few years.
Throughout the same past 20 years (1990-2010), the US economy has grown from 8 to 13 times X dollars (http://www.supportingevidence.com/Government/US_GDP_over_time.html), or put another way by 50% and then some. The US population in general has grown by roughly 25% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States).
So yeah, it's fast, but's it's 3.5% vs. 2% and 1% if you put it in those terms. (@editors) Let's have some context, yes?
I've seen kids from very religious households go in all different directions with respect to religions. It seems very unlikely that there's anything like a genetic "predisposition" to religion.
Suppose that out of every ten religious-gene children, seven become religious themselves (let's say, in five different religions); out of ten atheist-gene children, only six become religious. Then, this version of reality is consistent with your experince *and* with the headline+summary (I don't RTFA, the comments have more signal per time).
That's one issue: when you do any observation of complex systems, such as humans or groups of humans, you don't just look at a single data point. You look at two different points, and try to link the difference in outputs (kid religiousity) to the difference in inputs (parent religiousity).
Another issue: humans are complicated systems. Groups of humans even more so. Therefore, if you look at only one point of each type, you might get fooled by an arbitrary difference that's due to some unrelated factor. That's why you make a lot of observations, hoping that the unrelated variations distribute themselves evenly, such that the "sum of error vectors" is zero (or exponentially small) in both groups of subjects.
So even if your anecdote ran counter to the theory, you would need an overweight of similar anecdotes versus the ones confirming the theory, and the anecdotes would have to be chosen randomly in order for the assumption "the error vector sum is small" to make sense.
(At least as far as I understand science and statistics. If I'm wrong, please tell me: help me inform rather than misinform people in the future.)
No, of course he couldn't. Technical solutions to social problems never work.
Besides, he'd be conditioned into associating the screen images of CoD with the inane messaging on the chat, so his subconscious would expose him to the thing he was trying to suppress
as far as your defense of the cult of capitalism: i am a capitalist. but capitalism need social safety nets. pure capitalism is social darwinism which is a form of evil
I agree; not just safety nets, but progressive transfers, regulation to completely internalize externalities (pollution for one). Quoting myself,
free markets and private property has problems in itself as well
Note also I advocate land value taxation and (parts of) Georgeism; I'm told he was a strong workers' rights advocate, so I'm not pro big business or pro the rich people.
All that is to say: I have an issue with you saying that the thing I defend is a cult. I believe markets generally do well, based on the arguments economists use, and I assume that observational data and empiricism enters into those arguments and/or the validation of them. According to my limited understanding of how markets work, doing medicine on the market ought to work fine, but in practice socialised medicine appears to work best. Maybe the incentives are wrong or maybe the consumers are irrational or something, I'm not sure. But I'm pro socialised medicine because evidence says it works. I don't think a market cultist would be.
Top 3 of least social mobility (~= meritocracy): UK, Italy, US Top 3 of most social mobility: Denmark*, Australia, Norway (* I live here)
You have been told the American Dream, I take it? Then again, "non-OECD countries" is a good approximation of "most other countries", so I guess I agree, but I would encourage you and your readers to put that statement in perspective.
Also, I suspect the opportunities for relative social mobility give people an incentive to do the things that create a rising tide of upward absolute mobility for all boats, which makes a country rich and an OECD country. (So what I'm saying: there's a selection bias due to a correlation the other way when only comparing against rich/OECD countries).
The existing structure naturally concentrates wealth up.
Personal liberty, private property and well-functioning competitive markets (with internalized externalities) seems to be a good way to create a prosperous, mobile and fair society. What could stand in the way?
For one, if you're rich, after paying taxes and life's necessities (and maybe conveniencies and amusements) you often have money by which you can earn more money, and more so than the poor.
Also, taxes and other government fiddling might be regressive. Milton Friedman points to some progressive-intended regressive transfers in Free To Choose; you can watch clips on youtube (GIYF). His negative income tax is guaranteed to be regressive.
Thirdly, you might have exclusivity deals, monopolies, externalities and government corruption/bribery/lobbying. This will tend to favor special interests (especially those too big to fail) at the expense of "the rest of us". Also, you might have heritable special priviledges.
I agree with you: progressive transfers are a good thing, especially if you're a utilitarian---grep "Daniel Kahnemann" ted.com for a presentation of why.
For that reason, many libertarian beliefs only serve to reinforce existing class structures, because so many libertarians don't understand how unfair the distribution of wealth is.
I'm not one to defend libertarians---I by and large disagree with their views---but I think you misrepresent them. Or at least you don't represent the narrow subset I know of. Which is mostly through podcasting: Brett Veinotte (School Sucks), Wes Bertrand (Complete Liberty), Stephanie Murphy and Mike something (Porc Therapy) and Stephan Molineux (Free Domain Radio).
Their viewpoint is one of deontological morals: the moral value of an action is determined by the action itself, not its eventual outcome. Furthermore, what is moral is private property and non-agression: you're free to do whatever you please as long as you leave other people and their stuff alone. This is an argument against taxation, which they like to describe as the involuntary extraction of money by force or threat of force. They tend to be market-oriented and believe that free markets don't have problems, or that their problems are better than the problems of the state.
I think the state does something wrong (see exclusivity deals above), but free markets and private property has problems in itself as well: if land is a fixed-supply resource and increasing population means increasing demand, you can speculate in land (buy now, sell later) and extract money by renting it out to a landless population. I think the fix is land value taxation: turn the value of the rent into public property. If you're inclined towards math and economics, see also the Henry George theorem.
(* Your labor opportunity cost will not be compensated.)
That's the sarcastic way of saying I disagree: while it may be the sellers that paint the price sign and hang it up where buyers see it, they choose the price as a function of their customers' and potential customers' collective ability and willingness to pay (or they lose the price competition and close up their shops).
In general, these are the disciplines which should help people have a sense of perspective, and hopefully be less prone to believing bullshit.
Interesting. My bullshit detector recipe lists a somewhat different bundle of ingredients:
- Formal logic and proofs, as seen through the lens of mathematics. Knowledge of the most commonly used types of invalid or illogical arguments.
- An understanding of statistics and how not to get lied to with data. Remember to compare against baselines, compute conditional probabilities the right way around. Beware of selection biases.
- Philosophy of science and epistemology: we can know stuff through our senses and through experiments. An appreciation of the effect of science on society.
- Psychology: the biases of human cognition, memory, intuition and emotion. The reason we double-blind those scientific studies that deal with humans. Confirmation bias, selective memory.
- Economics and political science: having an understanding of which unintended consequences (misguided) policies might have. Having an understanding how what the left hand is doing affects what happens in the right hand. The seen and the unseen, and the use of knowledge in society.
It seems my bullshit detector leans more towards the natural and social sciences, but maybe I'm biased towards that end of the spectrum. I can see how history and economics interrelate, though, and philosophy includes philosophy of science and moral philosophy which is touched upon by economics---you can't evaluate an economic policy without a yardstick, and economic yardsticks are made out of moral philosophy.
spending money on things that can make people happy is by no means the worse a government can do.
The government could also not take the money in the first place, and then the people could themselves spend it on what makes them happy. If economic theory is worth anything, that will tend to make people better off, as they can always make the same choices the government would have made for them.
People knowing literature and philosophy makes them better humans
How so?
People knowing history and language makes them better citizens.
I get history (especially when related to economics). Care to explain how language makes people better citizens? What is a good vs. bad citizen?
And of course all those disciplines are unproductive so "the market" won't support them.
There seems to be a great market for education in the liberal arts. However, there doesn't seem to be a great market for liberal arts graduates, except as unskilled labor. As I would expect---are you willing to pay a premium on your groceries if the cashier knows 16th century french legal philosophy? Why/why not?
you might want to rethink you position on liberal arts: they might be useless for 99% of their students, but by no means for society
I'll give rethinking my position a fair shake if you'll help me rethink it.
As you have used the term, what are the liberal arts? What is the societal use of people being well versed in the liberal arts? What is the social use of people getting degrees in the liberal arts?
Absurd! Of COURSE there is a right to demand payment for your ideas. The alternative is that someone can force you to provide ideas against your will, should you decide to demand payment, i.e., slavery.
Sure, demanding payment, i.e. saying "you will give me money for this", is covered by freedom of speech. What's really at stake (and I think we agree about everything except the framing) is the right to not disclose ideas, and the right to enter into contracts.
No, actually, it is the other way around: there is no inherent right
How have you found out? I would like to know what inherent rights there are, but socialists, libertarians and geolibertarians all disagree. Who's right, and how do we know? If we prove our result, which axioms do we use? How do we know those axioms are the right ones?
Translated: I think it's all a matter of opinion. There are no objective moral truths (only factual ones). If you disagree, please prove one:-)
I don't think it stands up to any of the FOSS definitions of "open".
I assume by "it" you refer to a document specifying the H.264 video encoding standard.
By the FSF's definition of Free Software and the OSI's definition of an Open Source license, I'm guessing the document isn't "free" or "open". And if you like free software, that's not a problem.
The reason is: what it means for software to be free is that you are free to run, modify and redistribute it, as well as redistribute your modified versions.
Let's say I apply this to RFC 793 (the old TCP one): I distribute a document claiming to be the TCP standard, but I have changed so it's all wrong (say, I swapped the ports fields with the sequence number). Then people go and implement my false TCP "standard". Then shit breaks. Not good.
You really want the standard documents to be fixed once the standard has been ratified by the relevant organization(s) and/or people(s). It seems to be more friendly to the bazaar-style development practiced in large part by developers of free software if the standard document is freely redistributable, but not modifiable.
(On the other hand, maybe putting a crypto signature on one document and letting people change it without keeping the signature is fine, if you can make people look for the signature...)
I'm not sure the FSF have a definition of "Open Standard". As a first approximation, I can propose: a standard for a (class of) piece of software is "Free" (or "Freedom Respecting") if it is possible to create a piece of software implementing it which is free software.
(I won't even guess as to a definition of "Open Platform". That's besides the point for this discussion anyways.)
Land tax is, dissimilar to other taxes, also isn't distortionary; it doesn't carry a dead weight loss.
So taxing land would improve the overall wealth of society, and get rid of corruption. Note also the most recent bubble and burst? Was it a mortgage crisis or a land speculation crisis? How can you tell?
Also, what is "waste"? is funding fundamental science waste?
No, I don't think so. Some things that are worth the forgone consumption this year are not done by private initiative. Ever.
is funding liberal arts waste?
Arguably, yes. Around my parts, we make jokes about the humanities students educating themselves into unemployment, and a few years back we made jokes about them and a certain fast food McFranchise.
If no one wants to purchase their expertise, who benefits from it except themselves? If they are the sole beneficiaries, why should all of us pay for it? Shouldn't they (to be fair) pay each one of all of us the same amount we're paying them (resulting in a net transfer of 0)?
Are the likes of the FDA waste?
By requiring drugs to go through lengthy trials, you delay them coming onto the market. Whether the higher safety compensates for the delay in effective treatment is, I think, an empirical question.
Is paying for some dubious piece of art in your own town waste?
Let the free market handle this. If it "dies" in the free market, why is that the wrong result? What's the market failure here?
Is paying people to check for fraud waste
That depends on how much fraud it discovers and fines, and how much wasteful fraud it deters, versus how much it costs. Got the numbers?
Graph coloring is NP-complete. Sudoku is graph-coloring. Therefore, Sudoku is NP-complete.... because "is" is used in two different senses in the two first occurences.
Consider the set of all 9-colourable graphs. There's a map, mapping every soluble sudoku instance to a 9-colourable graph. However, this map doesn't need to be surjective; there might be 9-colourable graphs that do not correspond to sudoku instances (for instance, by not having exactly 81 nodes).
The NP-completeness of the problem "is this graph an element of the set of 9-colourable graphs" doesn't directly translate to a statement about any subset of the set of 9-colourable graphs. For example, the empty set is such a subset, and deciding membership of the empty set is rather easy.
It's not a big deal in Unix world where source code is generally available these days, which is why Unix compilers (e.g. g++ and Intel) converged on a common one; but Windows stuff is still broadly incompatible.
Just like everyone else except the US is using this non-standard and incompatible "metric system".;-)
The word you mention is the root of the term "economics"
Kinda' my point:)
something having to do with investment banking and currency arbitrage is assumed
That's sad; I hope it also makes people think about things like production, trade, consumption, market structures (i.e. competition vs. monopoly), industry organization (small vs. large firms), the first and second welfare theorem and the use of dispersed knowledge in society.
make sure you pay extra attention in the networking classes
I recently TA'ed a $Something and Networking class. We did IPv4, TCP/UDP, a bit of ARP. I gave pointers to out-of-scope practical stuff to my students (DNS, DHCP, RFCs @ IETF,...).
I think we were quite justified in teaching this, because this is the technology the students will most likely be faced with---and because it teaches networking principles reasonably well.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that you speak of reproduction rates, here's a thing that's bugging me:
For example, in the past 20 years, the Amish population in the US has doubled, increasing from 123,000 in 1991 to 249,000 in 2010.
What does that mean? Doubling sounds like a lot, but consider this:
It's about a 3.5% yearly growth. Your bank balance can probably do that with a reasonably diversified portfolio, at least if you can afford parking your money for a few years.
Throughout the same past 20 years (1990-2010), the US economy has grown from 8 to 13 times X dollars (http://www.supportingevidence.com/Government/US_GDP_over_time.html), or put another way by 50% and then some. The US population in general has grown by roughly 25% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States).
So yeah, it's fast, but's it's 3.5% vs. 2% and 1% if you put it in those terms. (@editors) Let's have some context, yes?
I've seen kids from very religious households go in all different directions with respect to religions. It seems very unlikely that there's anything like a genetic "predisposition" to religion.
Suppose that out of every ten religious-gene children, seven become religious themselves (let's say, in five different religions); out of ten atheist-gene children, only six become religious. Then, this version of reality is consistent with your experince *and* with the headline+summary (I don't RTFA, the comments have more signal per time).
That's one issue: when you do any observation of complex systems, such as humans or groups of humans, you don't just look at a single data point. You look at two different points, and try to link the difference in outputs (kid religiousity) to the difference in inputs (parent religiousity).
Another issue: humans are complicated systems. Groups of humans even more so. Therefore, if you look at only one point of each type, you might get fooled by an arbitrary difference that's due to some unrelated factor. That's why you make a lot of observations, hoping that the unrelated variations distribute themselves evenly, such that the "sum of error vectors" is zero (or exponentially small) in both groups of subjects.
So even if your anecdote ran counter to the theory, you would need an overweight of similar anecdotes versus the ones confirming the theory, and the anecdotes would have to be chosen randomly in order for the assumption "the error vector sum is small" to make sense.
(At least as far as I understand science and statistics. If I'm wrong, please tell me: help me inform rather than misinform people in the future.)
No, of course he couldn't. Technical solutions to social problems never work.
Besides, he'd be conditioned into associating the screen images of CoD with the inane messaging on the chat, so his subconscious would expose him to the thing he was trying to suppress
as far as your defense of the cult of capitalism: i am a capitalist. but capitalism need social safety nets. pure capitalism is social darwinism which is a form of evil
I agree; not just safety nets, but progressive transfers, regulation to completely internalize externalities (pollution for one). Quoting myself,
free markets and private property has problems in itself as well
Note also I advocate land value taxation and (parts of) Georgeism; I'm told he was a strong workers' rights advocate, so I'm not pro big business or pro the rich people.
All that is to say: I have an issue with you saying that the thing I defend is a cult. I believe markets generally do well, based on the arguments economists use, and I assume that observational data and empiricism enters into those arguments and/or the validation of them. According to my limited understanding of how markets work, doing medicine on the market ought to work fine, but in practice socialised medicine appears to work best. Maybe the incentives are wrong or maybe the consumers are irrational or something, I'm not sure. But I'm pro socialised medicine because evidence says it works. I don't think a market cultist would be.
Germany has probably gone further in the past 75 years than any nation in becoming a more inclusive society
I think you mean 65. Godwin agrees.
And in fact the USA does a better job of meritocracy than most other countries.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/10/oecd-uk-worst-social-mobility
Top 3 of least social mobility (~= meritocracy): UK, Italy, US
Top 3 of most social mobility: Denmark*, Australia, Norway (* I live here)
You have been told the American Dream, I take it? Then again, "non-OECD countries" is a good approximation of "most other countries", so I guess I agree, but I would encourage you and your readers to put that statement in perspective.
Also, I suspect the opportunities for relative social mobility give people an incentive to do the things that create a rising tide of upward absolute mobility for all boats, which makes a country rich and an OECD country. (So what I'm saying: there's a selection bias due to a correlation the other way when only comparing against rich/OECD countries).
The existing structure naturally concentrates wealth up.
Personal liberty, private property and well-functioning competitive markets (with internalized externalities) seems to be a good way to create a prosperous, mobile and fair society. What could stand in the way?
For one, if you're rich, after paying taxes and life's necessities (and maybe conveniencies and amusements) you often have money by which you can earn more money, and more so than the poor.
Also, taxes and other government fiddling might be regressive. Milton Friedman points to some progressive-intended regressive transfers in Free To Choose; you can watch clips on youtube (GIYF). His negative income tax is guaranteed to be regressive.
Thirdly, you might have exclusivity deals, monopolies, externalities and government corruption/bribery/lobbying. This will tend to favor special interests (especially those too big to fail) at the expense of "the rest of us". Also, you might have heritable special priviledges.
I agree with you: progressive transfers are a good thing, especially if you're a utilitarian---grep "Daniel Kahnemann" ted.com for a presentation of why.
For that reason, many libertarian beliefs only serve to reinforce existing class structures, because so many libertarians don't understand how unfair the distribution of wealth is.
I'm not one to defend libertarians---I by and large disagree with their views---but I think you misrepresent them. Or at least you don't represent the narrow subset I know of. Which is mostly through podcasting: Brett Veinotte (School Sucks), Wes Bertrand (Complete Liberty), Stephanie Murphy and Mike something (Porc Therapy) and Stephan Molineux (Free Domain Radio).
Their viewpoint is one of deontological morals: the moral value of an action is determined by the action itself, not its eventual outcome. Furthermore, what is moral is private property and non-agression: you're free to do whatever you please as long as you leave other people and their stuff alone. This is an argument against taxation, which they like to describe as the involuntary extraction of money by force or threat of force. They tend to be market-oriented and believe that free markets don't have problems, or that their problems are better than the problems of the state.
I think the state does something wrong (see exclusivity deals above), but free markets and private property has problems in itself as well: if land is a fixed-supply resource and increasing population means increasing demand, you can speculate in land (buy now, sell later) and extract money by renting it out to a landless population. I think the fix is land value taxation: turn the value of the rent into public property. If you're inclined towards math and economics, see also the Henry George theorem.
Which may be because top execs determine the financial value of just about everything.
Congratulations! You win a free* course in introductory microeconomics, at http://www.econtalk.org/ and/or http://www.youtube.com/user/jodiecongirl#p/c/22785443C5FB0F83
(* Your labor opportunity cost will not be compensated.)
That's the sarcastic way of saying I disagree: while it may be the sellers that paint the price sign and hang it up where buyers see it, they choose the price as a function of their customers' and potential customers' collective ability and willingness to pay (or they lose the price competition and close up their shops).
In general, these are the disciplines which should help people have a sense of perspective, and hopefully be less prone to believing bullshit.
Interesting. My bullshit detector recipe lists a somewhat different bundle of ingredients:
- Formal logic and proofs, as seen through the lens of mathematics. Knowledge of the most commonly used types of invalid or illogical arguments.
- An understanding of statistics and how not to get lied to with data. Remember to compare against baselines, compute conditional probabilities the right way around. Beware of selection biases.
- Philosophy of science and epistemology: we can know stuff through our senses and through experiments. An appreciation of the effect of science on society.
- Psychology: the biases of human cognition, memory, intuition and emotion. The reason we double-blind those scientific studies that deal with humans. Confirmation bias, selective memory.
- Economics and political science: having an understanding of which unintended consequences (misguided) policies might have. Having an understanding how what the left hand is doing affects what happens in the right hand. The seen and the unseen, and the use of knowledge in society.
It seems my bullshit detector leans more towards the natural and social sciences, but maybe I'm biased towards that end of the spectrum. I can see how history and economics interrelate, though, and philosophy includes philosophy of science and moral philosophy which is touched upon by economics---you can't evaluate an economic policy without a yardstick, and economic yardsticks are made out of moral philosophy.
spending money on things that can make people happy is by no means the worse a government can do.
The government could also not take the money in the first place, and then the people could themselves spend it on what makes them happy. If economic theory is worth anything, that will tend to make people better off, as they can always make the same choices the government would have made for them.
People knowing literature and philosophy makes them better humans
How so?
People knowing history and language makes them better citizens.
I get history (especially when related to economics). Care to explain how language makes people better citizens? What is a good vs. bad citizen?
And of course all those disciplines are unproductive so "the market" won't support them.
There seems to be a great market for education in the liberal arts. However, there doesn't seem to be a great market for liberal arts graduates, except as unskilled labor. As I would expect---are you willing to pay a premium on your groceries if the cashier knows 16th century french legal philosophy? Why/why not?
you might want to rethink you position on liberal arts: they might be useless for 99% of their students, but by no means for society
I'll give rethinking my position a fair shake if you'll help me rethink it.
As you have used the term, what are the liberal arts? What is the societal use of people being well versed in the liberal arts? What is the social use of people getting degrees in the liberal arts?
In this case, the right thing to do would be to release it to a video decoding layer for Linux
I think it's called mplayer :)
Ideas are not a zero-sum game like physical property
News flash: economists have discovered a new concept called "production", whereby raw materials are turned into goods. ;-)
Absurd! Of COURSE there is a right to demand payment for your ideas. The alternative is that someone can force you to provide ideas against your will, should you decide to demand payment, i.e., slavery.
Sure, demanding payment, i.e. saying "you will give me money for this", is covered by freedom of speech. What's really at stake (and I think we agree about everything except the framing) is the right to not disclose ideas, and the right to enter into contracts.
No, actually, it is the other way around: there is no inherent right
How have you found out? I would like to know what inherent rights there are, but socialists, libertarians and geolibertarians all disagree. Who's right, and how do we know? If we prove our result, which axioms do we use? How do we know those axioms are the right ones?
Translated: I think it's all a matter of opinion. There are no objective moral truths (only factual ones). If you disagree, please prove one :-)
For another, hardware cannot economically be distributed for free.
Even more striking: producing an extra unit of hardware is much more costly than producing an extra copy of a piece of software.
I don't think it stands up to any of the FOSS definitions of "open".
I assume by "it" you refer to a document specifying the H.264 video encoding standard.
By the FSF's definition of Free Software and the OSI's definition of an Open Source license, I'm guessing the document isn't "free" or "open". And if you like free software, that's not a problem.
The reason is: what it means for software to be free is that you are free to run, modify and redistribute it, as well as redistribute your modified versions.
Let's say I apply this to RFC 793 (the old TCP one): I distribute a document claiming to be the TCP standard, but I have changed so it's all wrong (say, I swapped the ports fields with the sequence number). Then people go and implement my false TCP "standard". Then shit breaks. Not good.
You really want the standard documents to be fixed once the standard has been ratified by the relevant organization(s) and/or people(s). It seems to be more friendly to the bazaar-style development practiced in large part by developers of free software if the standard document is freely redistributable, but not modifiable.
(On the other hand, maybe putting a crypto signature on one document and letting people change it without keeping the signature is fine, if you can make people look for the signature...)
I'm not sure the FSF have a definition of "Open Standard". As a first approximation, I can propose: a standard for a (class of) piece of software is "Free" (or "Freedom Respecting") if it is possible to create a piece of software implementing it which is free software.
(I won't even guess as to a definition of "Open Platform". That's besides the point for this discussion anyways.)
Those in the know can buy land near the rail projects ahead of time and reap the profits.
Land Value Tax would solve that; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
Land tax is, dissimilar to other taxes, also isn't distortionary; it doesn't carry a dead weight loss.
So taxing land would improve the overall wealth of society, and get rid of corruption. Note also the most recent bubble and burst? Was it a mortgage crisis or a land speculation crisis? How can you tell?
Also, what is "waste"? is funding fundamental science waste?
No, I don't think so. Some things that are worth the forgone consumption this year are not done by private initiative. Ever.
is funding liberal arts waste?
Arguably, yes. Around my parts, we make jokes about the humanities students educating themselves into unemployment, and a few years back we made jokes about them and a certain fast food McFranchise.
If no one wants to purchase their expertise, who benefits from it except themselves? If they are the sole beneficiaries, why should all of us pay for it? Shouldn't they (to be fair) pay each one of all of us the same amount we're paying them (resulting in a net transfer of 0)?
Are the likes of the FDA waste?
By requiring drugs to go through lengthy trials, you delay them coming onto the market. Whether the higher safety compensates for the delay in effective treatment is, I think, an empirical question.
Is paying for some dubious piece of art in your own town waste?
Let the free market handle this. If it "dies" in the free market, why is that the wrong result? What's the market failure here?
Is paying people to check for fraud waste
That depends on how much fraud it discovers and fines, and how much wasteful fraud it deters, versus how much it costs. Got the numbers?
Or is the fraud the largest cause of waste?
I don't know. That's an empirical question.
Graph-coloring (and sudoku) is NP-complete btw.
True. However, the argument emphatically isn't
Graph coloring is NP-complete. Sudoku is graph-coloring. Therefore, Sudoku is NP-complete. ... because "is" is used in two different senses in the two first occurences.
Consider the set of all 9-colourable graphs. There's a map, mapping every soluble sudoku instance to a 9-colourable graph. However, this map doesn't need to be surjective; there might be 9-colourable graphs that do not correspond to sudoku instances (for instance, by not having exactly 81 nodes).
The NP-completeness of the problem "is this graph an element of the set of 9-colourable graphs" doesn't directly translate to a statement about any subset of the set of 9-colourable graphs. For example, the empty set is such a subset, and deciding membership of the empty set is rather easy.
It's not a big deal in Unix world where source code is generally available these days, which is why Unix compilers (e.g. g++ and Intel) converged on a common one; but Windows stuff is still broadly incompatible.
Just like everyone else except the US is using this non-standard and incompatible "metric system". ;-)
I'm not comfortable with that, but can't think of a better nation.
One might start thinking about non-nations then. Like international cooperatives or unions or such.
Japan is actually a very respectable part of the world community today, despite the kind of atrocities they were committing during WWII.
Nuking innocent civilians?
(But see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes)
The word you mention is the root of the term "economics"
Kinda' my point :)
something having to do with investment banking and currency arbitrage is assumed
That's sad; I hope it also makes people think about things like production, trade, consumption, market structures (i.e. competition vs. monopoly), industry organization (small vs. large firms), the first and second welfare theorem and the use of dispersed knowledge in society.
"Husbandry" is "the management of domestic affairs and resources".
Sounds related to "oikonomos" (oikos means house).
Have you tried to run a mail server or a web server from your home lately?
I'm doing that, fwiw.
make sure you pay extra attention in the networking classes
I recently TA'ed a $Something and Networking class. We did IPv4, TCP/UDP, a bit of ARP. I gave pointers to out-of-scope practical stuff to my students (DNS, DHCP, RFCs @ IETF, ...).
I think we were quite justified in teaching this, because this is the technology the students will most likely be faced with---and because it teaches networking principles reasonably well.
(YMMV, FWIW, BLAH)
Sticking with IPv4 means constructing an ever more elaborate set of workarounds on top of each other.
Think of it this way: IPv4 creates jobs!